The wind in the Northern Steppes had long carried songs of lineage—echoes of names etched into the air by those who had walked and played rhythm across open grassland. But now, the wind was quiet.
Not stilled.
Erased.
High on a stony hill above the once-sacred Sifún Plateau, three memory-keepers sat in ritual formation. Each bore a different drum—woven, carved, or inked into their skin. Together, they had kept the Name-Lines for generations, drumming the legacies of births, unions, deaths.
Today, they drummed silence.
Not because they chose to.
Because they could not remember what should be played.
The sky above them cracked faintly—not with lightning, but with fracture. Threads of rhythm flickered in and out like failing stars.
One of them, Elder Ináké, stared at her hands. They no longer remembered her granddaughter's name.
And yet she knew she had one.
The Codex's reach was growing.
Far from the Northern Steppes, in the still-shadowed lands beyond the Hollow Basin, Ayanwale and his companions walked through the sacred ruins of Asélin, following a pulse only Zuberi could feel.
"Here," Zuberi said, slowing near a weathered obelisk half-swallowed by jungle vine. Their staff shimmered with residual rhythm, glowing faintly with spectral script that coiled like breath into air.
"This place isn't marked on the Map of Breath," Rotimi said, still weary, but steadier than before.
"It wouldn't be," Yẹ̀yẹ̀ Adùn replied. "Asélin was hidden long ago. Not to protect it from others, but to protect the others from what it once held."
"What did it hold?" Ayanwale asked.
Zuberi ran a hand over the obelisk. "The first fractured name."
A pause.
Ayanwale's brow furrowed. "What does that mean?"
Zuberi turned. "You've heard of those who lost their names to the Codex. But before the Codex was sealed, there were those who—willingly—gave up their names. Offered them to the void in exchange for power. For forgetting. For rewriting their path."
Rotimi whispered, "Name is identity. To give that up…"
"To give it up," Zuberi interrupted, "is to become unfixed. Unanchored. A rhythmless vessel."
"And the Splinter Order?" Ayanwale asked.
"They are what happens when too many unfixed souls find one another."
They pressed deeper into Asélin's remains—stone walls covered in glyphs that refused to be read, arches that led nowhere, windows that opened into the past. The wind moaned through them like a song trying to remember its chorus.
Ayanwale ran his fingers along one wall. The glyphs shimmered briefly, revealing flashes of long-forgotten rhythms. One depicted a boy holding a double-headed drum, facing a crowd with no faces.
He stepped back.
It was him.
Not him now—but a version of him, cast in stone thousands of years ago.
"Zuberi…" he called.
The seer approached slowly. Their gaze fell upon the carving.
Their face paled.
"I didn't know it was this deep," they whispered.
"What?" Ayanwale asked.
"This place isn't just history," Zuberi said. "It's a memory trap. The Codex seeded echoes here long ago. Waiting for rhythm-bearers to come."
"You mean this is a test?"
"No," Yẹ̀yẹ̀ Adùn said from behind them. "It's a mirror."
That night, while the others slept uneasily, Zuberi stayed awake, watching the stars pulse unnaturally above.
In the dying embers of the fire, they began to trace patterns. Not consciously—more as instinct.
Three lines crossed in a spiral.
Two names intersected.
And one—Zuberi—began to unravel at the edge.
They froze.
Then stood quickly and stepped away from the fire, staring at their staff. It no longer hummed with certainty.
Something was being pulled from them.
Their memory?
Their rhythm?
No—their certainty.
A rustle behind them.
A figure emerged from the shadows. Hooded. Silent.
Not Splinter Order.
Something older.
"I remember you," the figure whispered, voice dry and brittle like old parchment.
Zuberi raised their staff. "Who are you?"
The figure smiled.
"Someone you forgot. But I did not forget you."
And then it vanished, leaving behind only an old rhythm—one Zuberi had thought erased from the world.
The Thirteenth Sequence.
One not of harmony, or battle, or birth.
One of unraveling and mercy.
The next morning, Zuberi didn't mention the encounter.
But Ayanwale noticed their steps were slower, their gaze distant. As if a thread in their soul had been tugged.
"We'll go to the River of Echoes," Yẹ̀yẹ̀ Adùn announced. "There's still a songkeeper there who remembers the First Rhythm. If anyone knows how to resist the Codex's spread, it will be her."
"Is she loyal to the Weaving?" Rotimi asked.
"She is loyal to memory," Yẹ̀yẹ̀ Adùn replied. "That will have to be enough."
Far away, in the caverns of the Splinter Order, the nameless initiates chanted in silence, tracing their palms with symbols no one had taught them. They were being fed rhythm—not with sound, but with absence.
And at the center of them all, the Fragment of the Codex rotated in still air.
It pulsed once.
And a name disappeared from the world.
One of the Keepers in the Northern Steppes gasped—and died, mid-drumbeat, her name erased from her own mind.
None remembered her.
Except the Codex.
And it smiled.